On October 7, Coursera announced a partnership with NetEase, a Chinese Internet company and distributor of open education content. The partnership marked the launch of the Coursera Zone, a Chinese-language portal designed to make Coursera's existing content accessible to the Chinese audience through the use of volunteer translators. NetEase will host the video content in order to improve the video quality for users based in China, who previously had to use a VPN to access content.

This isn’t Coursera’s first deal in China. A month earlier it added Peking University as a partner. Prior to that it had also worked with prominent universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As MOOCs attempt to capture a global audience, it naturally raises questions about censorship in countries, like China, where freedom of information is a contentious issue. Will economic courses on communism, socialism and capitalism require pre-approval from one of China’s two million Internet monitors? What will happen if a course features politically sensitive stories about Tiananmen Square or Tibet?

While edX’s locally controlled platform leaves them free from maneuvering around China’s internet censorship policies, Coursera’s position is less clear. Based on the way its partnership is set up, it seems most of the filtering could be done by NetEase, leaving Coursera free from dealing with such messy questions.

As these overseas partnerships continue to form, questions like these will surely test the meaning of “open” in massively open online courses.

On October 7, Coursera announced a partnership with NetEase, a Chinese Internet company and distributor of open education content. The partnership marked the launch of the Coursera Zone, a Chinese-language portal designed to make Coursera's existing content accessible to the Chinese audience through the use of volunteer translators. NetEase will host the video content in order to improve the video quality for users based in China, who previously had to use a VPN to access content.

This isn’t Coursera’s first deal in China. A month earlier it added Peking University as a partner. Prior to that it had also worked with prominent universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As MOOCs attempt to capture a global audience, it naturally raises questions about censorship in countries, like China, where freedom of information is a contentious issue. Will economic courses on communism, socialism and capitalism require pre-approval from one of China’s two million Internet monitors? What will happen if a course features politically sensitive stories about Tiananmen Square or Tibet?

While edX’s locally controlled platform leaves them free from maneuvering around China’s internet censorship policies, Coursera’s position is less clear. Based on the way its partnership is set up, it seems most of the filtering could be done by NetEase, leaving Coursera free from dealing with such messy questions.

As these overseas partnerships continue to form, questions like these will surely test the meaning of “open” in massively open online courses.